The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,1

breath, “It’s like you’re living inside a lobotomy.”

“Oh, stop it,” Laurel said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sure it does,” Thalia said. “Lots of things live in holes. This place is a hole where your brains used to be.”

Thalia never grew to like Victorianna any better, but then she also said Laurel’s quilts, with all their jarring elements secreted or undercut, were too pretty to be considered art. Real art, Thalia said, went for the jugular. Laurel would let a bleached bird’s skull peek out of the gingham pocket of a country Christmas angel, but she’d never replace the angel’s pretty head with it. It wouldn’t feel right. Laurel saw her quilts complete in her mind’s eye, and she knew every piece—innocent, macabre, or neutral as beige velvet—must be subject to the larger pattern. Likewise, Victorianna’s pieces made a whole that Laurel thought was lovely.

Her neighbors might have their own especial favorite sins; they drank or fought, they cheated on their taxes or each other. But they washed and waxed their cars on Saturdays, and they kept their hedges and lamps trimmed. They put up neighborhood-watch signs and kept their curtains open, ever vigilant. Old-fashioned glass lampposts lined the streets, so that even at night, a ghost would be hard put to find a shadowed path to Laurel’s door.

Even so, that night the drowned girl came anyway.

A storm was gathering, so Laurel checked that the chain was on their bedroom door before climbing into bed. She was more likely to sleepwalk when the air was humid enough to hold the taste of electricity. She’d rise and undo locks, pull up windows, unpack closets and drawers. Once, she’d left a puffy beaded poppy she was hand-sewing sitting out on her bedside table. She fell asleep thinking that the black beads at the poppy’s center were as glossy and round as mouse eyes, and then she rose in the night and picked out every stitch. Her hands liked to open and undo while she was sleeping. The chain was no challenge. Its true job was to rattle against the door frame and wake up David so he could lead her back to bed.

Their bedroom felt like a crisper. David, whose metabolism ran so high his skin always felt slightly fevered, couldn’t sleep in summer unless the thermostat was set at 65. Laurel climbed in and got under the blankets, pressing her front against his warm back. She kissed his shoulder, but he didn’t stir. He was well and truly out, and his lanky body had solidified into something dense and hard to shift.

David was working fifteen-hour days, adapting simulator code he’d written for the navy into a PC game for a company out in California. He’d probably spoken ten complete sentences to her in the last week. All the pieces of him that she thought of as her husband had moved down to live in his brain stem, while coding took his higher functions.

In another week or two, when the math was done, he’d come up from his office in the basement, rubbing his eyes as if he’d awakened from a long sleep. He’d sit on the floor and lean against her shins, dropping his head back into her lap to look up at her with the same narrow, total focus he’d devoted to his code strings. “What’s been happening in the real world?” he’d say, meaning their world.

Laurel would drift her fingers through his hair, holding him rapt with tales of the bride quilt she was working on, her victory at neighborhood bunko, and this new boy at school whom Shelby kept too casually bringing up. David always came back to her, completely, and so she let him be.

She slept soundly until the temperature dropped further, then she shuddered, dreaming that her breath was curling out in smoky plumes like a dragon’s breath. She rolled onto her back, rising toward the surface of her sleep. Her eyes opened. She saw the outline of a young girl, twelve or thirteen, standing by the foot of the bed.

“Shelby?” she said, and sat up. But Shelby was built like a blade of grass, her breasts only now budding and the faintest curve to her tum. This girl’s puppy fat had shifted into real breasts and small hips, and she was soaked to the skin. She caught the moonlight coming in the window and reflected it, shimmering.

“Honey, aren’t you freezing?” Laurel asked her, but the question came out in a strained whisper, as if Laurel had